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Resources on Productivity

Reducing Costs Does Not Always Increase Profits

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To be blunt, taking measures at cost reduction is often a naive way of trying to increase profits. It’s not that there’s no place for it, but it’s typically first-level thinking that fails to see the big picture.

It’s like rent control in government: on the surface, it looks like controlling what rental properties can charge will keep prices down. But ultimately what it does is decrease the incentive for people to rent property, thus creating a housing shortage. This has been the well documented outcome in cities like New York and others, all over the world (see Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy for a great treatment of this).

The reason is that cost reduction measures often cut into the very things that produce the revenue for a company — including intangibles such as employee morale. (Yes, employee morale translates into revenue because it results in employees going the extra mile, treating customers better and more proactively, generating ideas that can enhance productivity and performance, and is even a more effective way to reduce costs because it reduces turnover.)

Here’s what Jeff Pfeffer has to say on this in What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management:

In case you haven’t noticed, in spite of the many rounds of wage cuts, the major airlines have continued to lose market share to the discount carriers such as JetBlue and Southwest and have continued to bleed money. . . . That’s because the solution management seized on — cutting workers’ pay — actually doesn’t do very much to make organizations more profitable and competitive or even, in some cases, to reduce costs.

Instead, cutting employee wages often worsens company problems. Hourly rates of pay simply don’t do nearly as much as most people seem to believe to determine a company’s — or even a country’s — competitive advantage. That’s because wage rates are not the same thing as labor costs, labor costs don’t equal total costs, and — in many instances — while it is n ice to be low cost, low costs and profits aren’t perfectly correlated either. . . .

The competitive success of airlines such as Southwest, Alaska, and JetBlue depends on lots of things besides wage rates. For a start, it’s nice to be able to offer customers a product or service offering they actually want to buy. . . .

Virgin Atlantic Airways has consistently pursued a strategy of offering more amenities and better service for both its business-class and economy fares, and has generated a profit when other airlines have struggled. After further upgrading its business-class seats and service in 2004, the carrier reported a 26 percent increase in business-class traffic for the fiscal year ending in February 2005. . . .

In the automobile industry as well, profits depend on more than just costs. Profits are also affected by brand image and product design and quality, all of which affect how much people are willing to pay for a car.

There is much more to being profitable (or, for a non-profit, having the funding they need) than cutting costs and being efficient. Often, the things that are most efficient — such as making sure employees feel that they are valued and respected and treated well — appear inefficient at first. But that’s just a short-term perspective. In the long-term, these “inefficient” things are actually more efficient, because they are the best prevention of the truly large and inefficient costs of high turnover and low quality.

What is the Fruit in John 15:5?

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In John 15:5, Jesus says “Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.”

What is the “fruit” that Jesus has in view here? Here is a helpful exposition of the text from DA Carson, from his The Gospel according to John:

There has been considerable dispute over the nature of the “fruit” that is envisaged [in this text]: the fruit, we are told, is obedience, or new converts, or love, or Christian character.

These interpretations are reductionistic. The branch’s purpose is to bear much fruit (v. 5), but the next verses show that this fruit is the consequence of prayer in Jesus’ name, and is to the Father’s glory (vv. 7, 8, 16).

This suggests that the “fruit” in the vine imagery represents everything that is the product of effective prayer in Jesus’ name, including obedience to Jesus’ commands (v. 10), experience of Jesus’ joy (v. 11 – as earlier his peace, 14:27), love for one another (v. 12), and witness to the world (vv. 16, 27).

This fruit is nothing less than the outcome of persevering dependence on the vine, driven by faith, embracing all of the believer’s life and the product of his witness.

Unmanaged Time Often Flows Toward Your Weaknesses

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A good point from Gordon MacDonald in Ordering Your Private World:

Because I had not adequately defined a sense of mission in the early days of my work, and because I had not been ruthless enough with my weaknesses, I found that I normally invested inordinately large amounts of time doing things I was not good at, while the tasks I should have been able to do with excellence and effectiveness were preempted. . . .

So why did I spend almost 75 percent of my available time trying to administrate and relatively little time studying and preparing to preach when I was younger? Because unseized time will flow in the direction of one’s relative weaknesses. Since I knew I could preach an acceptable sermon with a minimum of preparation, I was actually doing less than my best in the pulpit. That is what happens when one does not evaluate this matter and do something drastic about it.

Getting the Little Stuff Done First May be Satisfying, But It's the Wrong Road

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Julie Morgenstern, in Never Check E-Mail In the Morning: And Other Unexpected Strategies for Making Your Work Life Work:

Warming up your day by knocking off a bunch of quick, easy tasks is tempting, but it can provide you with a false sense of accomplishment.

The danger in this approach is that the bulk of your energy gets depleted over a bunch of insignificant tasks. First there’s email, then a couple of phone calls, then a meeting, then huddles with some direct reports and a quick sign-off on a project budget — then, guess what? It’s time for lunch!

To warm up after lunch, you start off with another round of email, then a client eats up your mid afternoon, and suddenly it’s 5 pm — and you never got around to, much less finished, the grant proposal — your day’s one-step-from-the-revenue-line priority. In fact, you can’t even remember what you did get done.

Solution: You must retrain yourself to choose the important over the quick, the tough over the easy, no matter how intimidating the project may be. Starting too far from the revenue line prevents you from producing the volume of revenue-generating work that your company actually relies on and pays you for.

Working from the bottom up puts you in a risky position — when that inevitable crisis appears, . . . how can you possibly handle it when you haven’t even gotten to your most important assignment yet!

Completely two or three tasks that directly make or save your company money far outweighs finishing twenty things that are three steps from the revenue line.

What is the Wasted Life?

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John Piper, in Don’t Waste Your Life:

God created us to live with a single passion: to joyfully display his supreme excellence in all the spheres of life. The wasted life is the life without this passion.

God calls us to pray and think and dream and plan and work not to be made much of, but to make much of him in every part of our lives.

Why Productivity Matters in Ministry: The Difference Between Seminary and Actual Ministry

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On Wednesday I asked what one thing about Getting Things Done you found to be most helpful. Thank you so much for all of your thoughts (both in the comments and by email). They have been really helpful!

Here is one comment from a reader that I especially wanted to highlight:

The whole concept/category of “knowledge work” was really helpful—never heard or thought along those lines previously. It helped to clarify practically why I struggle the way I do with productivity (my own heart issues obviously not addressed).

I wondered why I felt so incredibly productive in seminary and, well, the total opposite in ministry. Seminary was incredibly challenging, but it was so simple: just do what the professors assigned. All my tasks were clearly spelled out. Not so in ministry. As a self-employed “knowledge worker” with nobody handing me a syllabus, I was in quite a different position, and up to that point, I wasn’t able to clearly articulate why I felt so unproductive.

The label didn’t cure me—just clarified the problem. It helped to realize that I probably wasn’t the only one struggling.

I love this comment because of how it gets at one of the core challenges that I think many people in ministry experience — namely, the transition from seminary to full-time ministry and work.

This is the transition that actually got me interested in productivity in the first place. I went through seminary pretty fast — at one point I took 48 hours (= 16 classes) in a 9 month period. I did this without using a planner or even calendar (although I did write down a list of assignments once). One semester I completed all of my assignments within the first six weeks, and then had the rest of the semester almost entirely free from obligations (other than going to class; I used the time to work more and, I think, do more reading or something). I had never even heard of David Allen, and life worked great.

But then we moved back to Minneapolis (we had been at Southern Seminary in Louisville) and I started full-time at Desiring God. And my first task was not so small: launch a nationwide radio program while managing the church and conference bookstores at the same time. I found that my default practices for productivity just didn’t work. I realized I had to be more intentional and deliberate about how I got things done.

I had always read a lot. My focus up to that point had almost exclusively been theology. So I said to myself, “I’ll try to do the same thing with productivity — I’ll find some key books to read and try to develop an overall approach and system to keep track of what I have to do and stay focused on what is most important.”

At Desiring God, some people were reading Getting Things Done. So I picked that up. I also noticed that in the employee handbook for the church that they encouraged the use of Franklin Planners and would even pay $50 a year for you to get one and replace the pages each year. So I got one of those as well. This led to developing my own approach that merged what I took to be the best insights from David Allen and Stephen Covey, along with some of my own thinking.

Anyway, that’s how I got into productivity. I think the struggle I had is something that many other people also have experienced and continue to experience. And that’s why I resonate with Andrew’s comment above so much

Pursue Excellence, Not Being Elite

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A good interview with Andy Crouch, author of Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling.

Crouch argues that “everyone should strive to make culture by humbly mastering a field that intersects with the world’s brokenness.” And he believes just that: everyone can make culture, not just the elite.

That seems to be a major difference between his book and James Davidson Hunter’s To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World.

Wasn’t Mark using street language so as to communicate with common folks, not elites? Does the difference between street and elite play into the difference between your book, Culture Making, and James Davidson Hunter’s book To Change the World? He seems to argue that elites make culture, and you write more about everyone making culture. Is that a valid distinction? Yes, that’s so true. Dr. Hunter and I have different instincts. When you ask when I first made culture, I don’t think of my first publication in a national magazine. I think of the “ABC Song,” because that’s culture. Where does cultural influence come from? It’s very mysterious—the Holy Spirit can work through a lot of different vessels.

I think that’s a key difference.

I respect James Davidson Hunter’s book very much, and learned a lot from it. But I also think he makes some critical mistakes, chief among them being that he fails to take into sufficient account the changes brought about by the rise of the Internet. In many respects I think a helpful companion book would be Jeff Jarvis’s What Would Google Do?.

How to Increase the Emotional Intelligence of Your Email Messages

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A good article on the emotional intelligence of email at the 99% by Scott McDowell. Here’s the first part:

Earlier this year I attended a presentation with Daniel Goleman, author of Social Intelligence and godfather of the field of Emotional Intelligence. According to Goleman, there’s a negativity bias to email – at the neural level.

In other words, if an email’s content is neutral, we assume the tone is negative.  In face-to-face conversation, the subject matter and its emotional content is enhanced by tone of voice, facial expressions, and nonverbal cues.  Not so with digital communication.

Technology creates a vacuum that we humans fill with negative emotions by default, and digital emotions can escalate quickly (see: flame wars). The barrage of email can certainly fan the flames. In an effort to be productive and succinct, our communication may be perceived as clipped, sarcastic, or rude. Imagine the repercussions for creative collaboration.

He goes on to give six tips for making sure your email messages communicate the right tone.

How Information Overload Affects Decision Making

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A recent article from Newsweek. Here’s the summary:

The Twitterization of our culture has revolutionized our lives, but with an unintended consequence—our overloaded brains freeze when we have to make decisions.

And this is very interesting:

The booming science of decision making has shown that more information can lead to objectively poorer choices, and to choices that people come to regret. It has shown that an unconscious system guides many of our decisions, and that it can be sidelined by too much information. And it has shown that decisions requiring creativity benefit from letting the problem incubate below the level of awareness—something that becomes ever-more difficult when information never stops arriving.

An Interview with Tim Challies on Productivity, Part Two

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Today we complete the interview with Tim Challies that we started yesterday. Thanks again, Tim, for your insight!

6. Many of my readers know of you through your very helpful blog. What is your process for blogging? For example, how do you choose what to blog on each day? What do you do if, say, on a Saturday afternoon an idea for a post comes to you. Do you collect post ideas and work from a list, or just decide afresh each day?

Most days I sit down at my computer at 8 AM and just see what happens. I maintain a list of potential topics within Things, but usually what happens is that an idea will strike and I’ll try to spend a day or two thinking about it and running over it in my mind. After a couple of days of ruminating I find that the words tend to come quite easily. Occasionally when the muse is speaking I will sit down and write out several posts at once. But far more often I write and post all at the same time. I’m not nearly as organized as some might think. But I find this adds to the immediacy, freshness and honesty of the blog. What I’m thinking today I’m writing about today. Or that’s the hope.

7. Why do you think Christians should care about productivity? (Or, dare I say it, if you don’t think Christians should care, why not?)

Christians should care about productivity. That’s not to say that they should necessarily be driven by a desire to accomplish more things in less time. Rather, they should be motivated to use their time well and to do everything with excellence. God is glorified when we use our time well and when we do what we do well. There can be productivity in simplicity, not just in quantity.

8. In the last three months, what has been the most helpful productivity practice or tip for making you productive and effective?

I think it is one that came while writing The Next Story and it involves reducing my dependency on technology. There are times when I feel that there has to be a technological solution to every problem, and especially to every problem created or exacerbated by technology. So when I find that I need to record more information than ever before, I want to find the perfect app to deal with the increased quantity. But in many ways I’ve found it better to take steps backward, depending more than ever on pen and paper. And I am honestly more organized and productive for it. Until I lose my notebook.

Second to that I would say it is trying to maintain an empty inbox. Few things feel better in a digital world than looking at an inbox and seeing nothing there. That’s especially true when it’s 5 PM on a Friday. Just don’t tweet your accomplishment because every one of your hilarious friends will send you an email to fill it back up.

9. Do you have any bad productivity habits that you think might undermine your productivity and which you are seeking to change?

Absolutely. My biggest weakness is distraction. I wrote a whole chapter in my book on the subject and still find that I succumb to it. I find it very, very difficult to shut down my email while writing or blogging or preparing a sermon or doing any other kind of work. And it proves a constant temptation and constant distraction. I simply need to discipline myself to shut down email when trying to focus on other matters. My most productive days are the days in which I do batch processing of my email and then shut it down and forget all about it.

10. What is the most helpful book on productivity that you have read?

I know it’s a cliche, but I’ve got to go with Getting Things Done. I think it’s also the only book I’ve ever read on productivity. In the end I did not adopt very much of the GTD system, but found myself grateful for the issues it raised. It got me thinking in valuable directions, even if the solution Allen proposes is doomed to failure by virtue of its almost impossible complexity.